The world-conquering songwriter and producer tells Matt Mullen about his love of vintage gear and the synths behind Taylor Swift’s Midnights
Jack Antonoff thinks pop music is a paradox. “The irony of pop music is that it’s this field that’s so rigid, but the only stuff that’s successful is the stuff that’s out on the other side of it,” he tells us. “If you write something that you think is a perfect pop song, that fits perfectly into everything, it’s probably boring as fuck. The perfect pop song is by definition the imperfect pop song.”
We’re inclined to agree, because if anyone knows a few things about how to write a chart-toppingly, world-shakingly good pop song in 2023, it’s probably Jack Antonoff. Awarded the Grammy for Producer of the Year the past two years running, he’s worked on some of the past decade’s biggest albums; collaborations with Lorde, Pink, St. Vincent and Florence and the Machine all come to mind, and that’s before we’ve even mentioned a screamingly successful year that’s seen Antonoff take the helm for The 1975’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language and Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.
Are we forgetting something? Oh, yes: Taylor Swift. Since forging a longstanding creative partnership with Swift – by all accounts the world’s most popular artist – in 2013, Antonoff has co-produced and co-written on every one of her studio albums. Most recently, the pair’s symbiotic aptitude for hitmaking has produced 2022’s Midnights, a stylistic left-turn that saw Swift trade in Folklore’s sensitive, finger-picked guitars for a moody, dark-hued palette of vintage synthesisers, shattering streaming records in the process. Alongside all of this, Antonoff has indefatigably maintained a career as a solo artist, writing, recording and touring anthemic, Springsteenian synth-pop under the alias Bleachers.
With a schedule this packed, we’re surprised Antonoff found the time to sit down with Future Music. Fortunately for us, he found a spare moment to talk us through his deep love of vintage gear, the synths that shaped the sound of Midnights, and why he can’t stop scrolling through Reverb at 4AM.
Let’s talk about your relationship with gear. For some producers the equipment is just a means to an end, but others love to geek out over technology. Which side are you on?
“I’m completely out of the box with gear. I’ve never used a MIDI instrument in my life. I’m always pushing myself by using different things, and what’s nice about analogue gear is everything is a completely new journey.
“I’ve been obsessed with Binsons. The Binson Echorec and the Baby Binson and the Binson Reverb, which was a really weird thing. Th
